In the long run, scaling down his live rig has ultimately given Lemon more advantages and a new way of working moving forward.
“Having the ability to use what you use on your DAW at home out in the field has sort of changed things,” Lemon says. “There’s no doubt about it, and long-term, it will give me a lot more nuance in my mixes ultimately because there’s so much more flexibility—especially in terms of presets and snapshots.
“Between what you can do with the Waves plug-ins and what’s available onboard the DiGiCo is fairly limitless. It’d be great with the SD7 as well, although I’m not sure whether I’d use that many plug-ins—32 racks is a lot—it would probably depend on the amount of inputs.
“But if you figure most bands I typically work with are between 50-90 inputs, I’d probably realistically only use 16 to 20 plug-ins or so.”
Another boom of the Waves SoundGrid came after the tour had ended when Lemon was asked to mix three songs from a live recording done at one of The Fray’s sideshows at the Fillmore Auditorium.
“The recording was done in Pro Tools by the venue as it was a fly date and one of the only shows I did not record myself. Funny enough, I was able to take many of the presets from the live console’s Waves plug-ins and import them into my Pro Tools session as I’d stored the files for the presets for each individual plug-in off the SD10.
” I found that intriguing; that I could get my drum and vocal reverbs and de-esser exactly where I’d honed it in live. It made the mixes I had to do for the band extremely quick and easy because I was able to access all my presets from the live show. And of course that will work the other way around as well, as you can hone reverbs and the like at home and import them into your DiGiCo/Waves session.”
What began as an experiment in streamlining a somewhat complex audio touring rig into a compact and features-packed system has perhaps become a new way of working for Lemon.
“I found this to be a viable system for many if not most of the bands that I’d be working with down the road. The trial proved most enlightening and will no doubt impact the day-to-day workflow for me from now on. And needless to say as a longtime DiGiCo user, I’m so pleased to be able to have an all-in-one that’s DiGiCo top to bottom and that I can flex for whatever band has got me on its payroll.”